After rain
Rosa ‘Albertine’
Rain at last: a heavy downpour after weeks of hot sun and drying winds. After dinner, I remember that I didn’t top-up my calves’ granola bucket after their last feed so I step into my wellies and head for the farm. The evening light glows yellow and there is a custardy warmth to the sunshine in the damp air. I begin to turn right at the end of the street, angling my body towards the farm, and then I stop dead. Quite suddenly, I am back in my childhood garden. Feeling utterly disorientated, I turn a slow, confused circle at the end of our street in south Cumbria, trying to work out how I can have slid back decades to the middle of our Wiltshire garden. And I know exactly where I am in that garden: just uphill of the pond but not yet at the washing line, standing beside the line of shrubs that divides the garden into two parts. I frown into the lemony Cumbrian sunlight: neither sight nor sound are any help at this moment. I inhale and exhale. And there it is: just over my left shoulder. I turn and inhale more deeply. Inhale and exhale again. My childhood garden is wafting from the trellis that Kath’s husband Paul welded for her, more than forty years ago. We had a trellis at home in Wiltshire: a panel of simple wooden squares that supported Mum’s Albertine rose. And here is that rose on Kath’s fence. I step towards it, breathing in the scent, one foot in Wiltshire and the other in Cumbria, as time - momentarily - folds into a neat minute.
Turning west, into the evening light, I find the lane full of smells released by the rain: damp earth, warm tarmac, honeysuckle, elderflower, more honeysuckle and then the aniseed of almost-over sweet cicely. As I reach the steepest part of the lane, I get a lungful of cow muck from the heifers in the fields to my left and then, at the very top of the lane, a gust of ginger cake, still hot from Bernadette’s oven.
In the calf hull, I slide the make-shift lid off the big blue bucket and scoop four double handfuls of granola into the bucket. The granola is a deep brown mix of concentrates: oats, barley, maize, beans, peas and oils. It looks like an upmarket breakfast cereal and smells like fig rolls. I drop the re-filled bucket into the metal holder hooked onto the 5ft hurdle and the twins bump noses as they dive straight in. I rub their foreheads goodnight and scoop a few strands of straw out of their water before I leave the hull.
I call in at the farmhouse to let Ian know that the calves are settled. He appears from the gloom of the sitting room with his iPad in one hand and the TV chatting behind him.
“Have you sniffed my hay?”
“Pardon?”
“My hay. Have you sniffed it?”
“Your hay? I didn’t know that you were making hay. I thought that you were making some more round bales.”
“Well, when Rye came to bale it was so dry that we called off Nick with the wrapper. It’s hay. Smell it.”
“Where is it?”
“Int’ barn.” Ian nods towards the southern side of the yard.
“Ok.” I reverse out of the door and Ian follows me. In the open-sided barn are huge round bales of grass cut from the wildflower meadow down by the river. I put my hand on the nearest one, as if on the broad flank of a docile cow, and sniff. Without the pickled dampness of silage or haylage, the flower-grass has a dry perfume that holds sunshine, wind, blended grasses, cranesbills, yellow rattle and a few docks, nettles and thistles.
“It’s like wine,” I say. “Or fresh bread. Or something.”
“It’s like hay,” Ian says “My dad used to chew it. He always had a piece in his mouth at this time of year. ”
I walk home through the buttery light, passing the snuffle of heifers grazing along the hedge line. On the lower slopes of the fell, sunlight illuminates raw blonde fields cropped as short as a new marine’s buzz cut.